Food hasn't been a good indicator of inflation for decades. Better manufacturing and logistics has made food super cheap. Housing and healthcare are much larger expenditures and are largely underrepresented by USA's CPI.
Food being largely "super cheap" is exactly why it's a good indicator of inflation, as it applies to actual peoples' lives. Milk, cheese, oats, eggs, butter, bread, are things that people need for themselves and for their children. When these things go up in price, that's real inflation. Not metropolitan wankers pushing paper and courting similar paper-pushing wankers from abroad.
On the contrary, agriculture is a tiny portion of our nation's economy. For quite a while, food was practically an afterthought. Buying 2 cars and feeding a family of 5 on the salary that could be had with a high school diploma was the norm at one point. You don't have all of these things because you're worried about the cost of food. People don't get grotesquely obese if calories are expensive.
Food prices are becoming relevant again because of rampant and massive theft by the upper class. It has little to do with the actual effort required to produce food.
On the contrary, real, actual people who need to eat are far less concerned with what you're calling "the economy," which is people at desks typing numbers into computers, and are far more concerned with putting nutritious calories into the mouths of their children. These people are concerned with the cost of food, which makes a 40% increase in the cost of eggs and butter of far more importance to them than whatever piece of shared hallucination pretend paper slash computer money that is your primary concern.
Now if you want to get egghead about it, the real concern behind increasing food costs is why the prices of these goods are increasing; and there you have the actual economy. Energy, fertilizer, transportation, water, waste, feed, fuel, machinery, maintenance, parts and labor, are all included in the resultant price of food. A double-digit increase in the cost of a gallon of milk, a rasher of bacon, or a dozen eggs, indicates in a very important and easily-observable way that vital gears in "the economy" have gone intensely fucky and we should probably find out why and fix it.
We are not talking about an extra quarter for Little Debbie star pies or whatever. We are talking about the baseline stuff here that everyone needs. If you want to laser focus your attention on mercurial real estate prices or bond markets or whatever, that's your prerogative, but it isn't the least bit useful for people trying to navigate the times. You will not consider food "an afterthought" when you can't get it anymore.
You've been so thoroughly robbed that you would consider having food in your belly to be enough. And that's exactly why we'll never have the golden age of the 60s ever again. Technology gives us far more wealth than just food and shelter, but most of it goes to our overlords.
No, I live in an agricultural region, where what goes into food production is something that everyone living in the region deals with, in a practical fashion, on a daily basis.
This isn't academic bullshit, this is literal life and death. You've been "well ackshually"-ing the topic of inflation off into the realm of metaphorical nonsense, which is the kind of thing the current abhorrent Executive administration, and the Party behind it, thrives on. I've been dragging it, over and over, back to the realm of reality. "Food in your belly" is a series of industries working in tandem, also subject to regulation and supply chain and the energy market. It is frankly ignorant and childish of you to reduce it to some kind of primitivism, when it is literally the lifeblood of this and every other civilization. Hand-wave it away at your peril.
Housing hasn't been a good indicator of inflation for ages, it's in a bubble and chinese investment chasing a safe foreign deposit and entire country's economies (aus) dependent on it, and ludicrous regulation, has driven the housing price up well beyond inflation, but with the bubble now peaking and rates going up we're about to see it pop like in 2008.
Global elites/ politicians have locked down countries/ states do to Covid, are aggravating the Ukraine / Putin war, create an incoming food crisis but there is no accountability and they pretend like they did not freaking caused it.
I so fucking hate how they pretend that the incoming crisis is do to Covid, it is not do to Covid it is do to the lockdowns the people in charge put in. Is not Ukraine / Putin war that is causing problems is the restrictions put on Russia
This is perhaps the most infuriating part of it all. These globalists are constantly telling us that the world “is changing” and we have to respond (with their policies, of course). In reality, the globalists are changing the world, deliberately, implementing their policies unilaterally, and we have no say in the matter. They are just the latest iteration of tyrannical elites, massaging their authoritarianism with manipulative appeals to altruism, empathy, environmentalism, etc.
Yeah. They keep saying how all this is a "great opportunity". It's like if they broke your spine and told you it was a great opportunity to learn to walk again. That's not how it works.
Yeah, but inflation mostly makes the poorest people poorer.
The EU, in the process of buying into "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy about it", does not seem to view this as a problem.
How long before those who've been wiped out by this are offered a choice ... come, sign the contract and join the WEF family - for you and your children. If we allow you children. Trade your civil rights for perpetual servitude, in a gilded cage.
The Italian Inposition. The reason the ECB won't raise rates is because the Italian government is so indebted that they'd have to default if interest rates went up, which would tank the Euro and crash every other European economy.
I'm not really blaming the Italians for the EU's predicament. This is ultimately the problem with having an international currency. The EU nominally has policies in place to guard against this kind of thing by preventing its member states from borrowing so much, or from adopting the kind of debt structure that the Italian government has done.
The problem is that the EU's commitment to expansion for the sake of expansion means they keep ignoring their own rules in order to accommodate economies like Greece, which should never have been allowed to join, and Italy, which joined and then spent 20 years breaking the rules.
So now the ECB is in a situation, caused by their own shitty policies and Brussels' refusal to enforce some of the only good economic policies they had, where they're fucked no matter what they do. Keeping interest rates low will cause inflation to spin even more out of control, but raising them will create a domino effect of debt defaults, starting with Italy, then countries like Greece and Portugal or even Spain.
Either way, the Euro's value collapses, and Europe's supply chain crisis gets even worse because of the sheer amount they'll have to spend on imports. They could alleviate some of that by trying to stimulate local production rather than doing the opposite (see: the Netherlands and Ireland), but even if they did, Europe can't produce enough food to feed its population.
They admit to 10.8%
We all know these numbers the world over are wild underestimates
Food hasn't been a good indicator of inflation for decades. Better manufacturing and logistics has made food super cheap. Housing and healthcare are much larger expenditures and are largely underrepresented by USA's CPI.
Food being largely "super cheap" is exactly why it's a good indicator of inflation, as it applies to actual peoples' lives. Milk, cheese, oats, eggs, butter, bread, are things that people need for themselves and for their children. When these things go up in price, that's real inflation. Not metropolitan wankers pushing paper and courting similar paper-pushing wankers from abroad.
On the contrary, agriculture is a tiny portion of our nation's economy. For quite a while, food was practically an afterthought. Buying 2 cars and feeding a family of 5 on the salary that could be had with a high school diploma was the norm at one point. You don't have all of these things because you're worried about the cost of food. People don't get grotesquely obese if calories are expensive.
Food prices are becoming relevant again because of rampant and massive theft by the upper class. It has little to do with the actual effort required to produce food.
On the contrary, real, actual people who need to eat are far less concerned with what you're calling "the economy," which is people at desks typing numbers into computers, and are far more concerned with putting nutritious calories into the mouths of their children. These people are concerned with the cost of food, which makes a 40% increase in the cost of eggs and butter of far more importance to them than whatever piece of shared hallucination pretend paper slash computer money that is your primary concern.
Now if you want to get egghead about it, the real concern behind increasing food costs is why the prices of these goods are increasing; and there you have the actual economy. Energy, fertilizer, transportation, water, waste, feed, fuel, machinery, maintenance, parts and labor, are all included in the resultant price of food. A double-digit increase in the cost of a gallon of milk, a rasher of bacon, or a dozen eggs, indicates in a very important and easily-observable way that vital gears in "the economy" have gone intensely fucky and we should probably find out why and fix it.
We are not talking about an extra quarter for Little Debbie star pies or whatever. We are talking about the baseline stuff here that everyone needs. If you want to laser focus your attention on mercurial real estate prices or bond markets or whatever, that's your prerogative, but it isn't the least bit useful for people trying to navigate the times. You will not consider food "an afterthought" when you can't get it anymore.
You've been so thoroughly robbed that you would consider having food in your belly to be enough. And that's exactly why we'll never have the golden age of the 60s ever again. Technology gives us far more wealth than just food and shelter, but most of it goes to our overlords.
No, I live in an agricultural region, where what goes into food production is something that everyone living in the region deals with, in a practical fashion, on a daily basis.
This isn't academic bullshit, this is literal life and death. You've been "well ackshually"-ing the topic of inflation off into the realm of metaphorical nonsense, which is the kind of thing the current abhorrent Executive administration, and the Party behind it, thrives on. I've been dragging it, over and over, back to the realm of reality. "Food in your belly" is a series of industries working in tandem, also subject to regulation and supply chain and the energy market. It is frankly ignorant and childish of you to reduce it to some kind of primitivism, when it is literally the lifeblood of this and every other civilization. Hand-wave it away at your peril.
Housing hasn't been a good indicator of inflation for ages, it's in a bubble and chinese investment chasing a safe foreign deposit and entire country's economies (aus) dependent on it, and ludicrous regulation, has driven the housing price up well beyond inflation, but with the bubble now peaking and rates going up we're about to see it pop like in 2008.
Global elites/ politicians have locked down countries/ states do to Covid, are aggravating the Ukraine / Putin war, create an incoming food crisis but there is no accountability and they pretend like they did not freaking caused it.
I so fucking hate how they pretend that the incoming crisis is do to Covid, it is not do to Covid it is do to the lockdowns the people in charge put in. Is not Ukraine / Putin war that is causing problems is the restrictions put on Russia
This is perhaps the most infuriating part of it all. These globalists are constantly telling us that the world “is changing” and we have to respond (with their policies, of course). In reality, the globalists are changing the world, deliberately, implementing their policies unilaterally, and we have no say in the matter. They are just the latest iteration of tyrannical elites, massaging their authoritarianism with manipulative appeals to altruism, empathy, environmentalism, etc.
Yeah. They keep saying how all this is a "great opportunity". It's like if they broke your spine and told you it was a great opportunity to learn to walk again. That's not how it works.
Yeah, but inflation mostly makes the poorest people poorer.
The EU, in the process of buying into "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy about it", does not seem to view this as a problem.
How long before those who've been wiped out by this are offered a choice ... come, sign the contract and join the WEF family - for you and your children. If we allow you children. Trade your civil rights for perpetual servitude, in a gilded cage.
WEF is already buying up, or trying to anyway, farmland in the netherlands.
And yet another anchor dragging the EU straight to hell. NO ONE EXPECTS THE SPANISH IMPOSITION!
The Italian Inposition. The reason the ECB won't raise rates is because the Italian government is so indebted that they'd have to default if interest rates went up, which would tank the Euro and crash every other European economy.
Just globalism things.
I'm not really blaming the Italians for the EU's predicament. This is ultimately the problem with having an international currency. The EU nominally has policies in place to guard against this kind of thing by preventing its member states from borrowing so much, or from adopting the kind of debt structure that the Italian government has done.
The problem is that the EU's commitment to expansion for the sake of expansion means they keep ignoring their own rules in order to accommodate economies like Greece, which should never have been allowed to join, and Italy, which joined and then spent 20 years breaking the rules.
So now the ECB is in a situation, caused by their own shitty policies and Brussels' refusal to enforce some of the only good economic policies they had, where they're fucked no matter what they do. Keeping interest rates low will cause inflation to spin even more out of control, but raising them will create a domino effect of debt defaults, starting with Italy, then countries like Greece and Portugal or even Spain.
Either way, the Euro's value collapses, and Europe's supply chain crisis gets even worse because of the sheer amount they'll have to spend on imports. They could alleviate some of that by trying to stimulate local production rather than doing the opposite (see: the Netherlands and Ireland), but even if they did, Europe can't produce enough food to feed its population.
Things will get wild in diverse Western Europe cities if the inflation crisis crashes the wellfare system.
It's both, really. No one gives a fuck if Greece craters but the people who own villas there, but the large economies of Spain and Italy...
Considering that they operate on the Euro how much does runaway inflation in one country effect the other countries?
bursts into the room
Nooooobody expects the Spanish Inflation!
You'll eat the bugs and use solar power when you literally can't afford anything else.
Mine more silver.